Working
Shame on Nurse Ratched for pointing to these games.
Surely she knows we should be reading someone’s blog working instead of exploring even one of these 30 games.
Yearly Archives: 2003
You Have to be Kidding
A prison officer was sacked for making an allegedly insulting remark about Osama bin Laden two months after the September 11 attacks, an employment tribunal heard yesterday.
Colin Rose, 53, was told he had to go because, although he did not know it, three Muslim visitors could have heard his “insensitive” comment about the world’s most reviled terrorist.
If this is as described in the article it is just rediculous.
David Carr suggests:
Just in case Mr Rose happens to be reading this, he should memorise and repeat the following statement:
“Osama bin Laden is merely the poor, desperate victim of oppression and social injustice”.
With sufficient sensitivity training, I am quite confident that unpleasantness of this nature can be avoided in the future.
Philip K. Dick
Fans as well as the curious will want to visit the new official Philip K. Dick website. The official biography (short) has some interesting items.
Also, Wired has a lengthy article subtitled The inside-out story of how a hyper-paranoid, pulp-fiction hack conquered the movie world 20 years after his death..
All of this, of course, happening just prior to the 12/25 opening of the latest Dick film adaptation: Paycheck.
Via Planet Swank.
Microsoft Geek Blogs
Infoworld reports that M$ has launched a techy weblog service called The Spoke:
Joe Wilcox, a Washington, D.C.-based Jupiter Research senior analyst, doesn’t see TheSpoke as a threat to other blog services, but rather as a tool for Microsoft to win support from young software developers who might otherwise choose to work on projects that compete with Microsoft.
“While there is a blogging component, TheSpoke is not a blogging site. Creating this kind of community is a longstanding Microsoft approach, particularly when it comes to building relations with developers,” he said. “Considering that academia is fertile ground for Mac and other Unix and Linux development, Microsoft is wise to provide alternative resources like TheSpoke, where student developers can gather and build a community.”
According to Technorati a dozen plus folks have blogged about this service. FWIW, I looked at 5-6 of the Spoke blogs and none of them show up in Technorati so this is a pretty new effort and appears to not have linked into the larger community yet.
Welcome to these folks.
Two faces of Michael Powell
Yesterday Michael Powell said the following (PDF) in remarks opening a forum on Voice over IP:
As one who believes unflinchingly in maintaining an Internet free from government regulation, I believe that IP-based services such as VOIP should evolve in a regulation-free zone.
No regulator, either federal or state, should tread into this area without an absolutely compelling justification for doing so.
This is the same guy that recently supported the implementation of the broadcast flag and willingly accepts it as his duty to use regulation to push the implementation of HDTV which may be nifty high quality but, nevertheless, should be left to find its own way in the market. We will either embrace it or ignore it.
Something that could bring the development of VoIP to a grinding halt is this push (requires free registration) by the FBI and the Justice Department to have the FCC assure that they will be able to eavesdrop on our VoIP calls:
The FBI and Justice Department want the FCC to classify Internet-based telephony as a traditional telecommunications service, which would subject it to federal laws requiring carriers or software companies “to develop intercept solutions for lawful electronic surveillance.”
It is time to just say no to these folks.
Via beSpacific here and here.
Update (12/3): For more on the FCC’s VoIP forum see The Knowledge Problem.